Amid the blindness epidemic in the novel, guns symbolize the idea that a person or governing body’s capacity for violence determines how much power they hold. In the quarantined hospital, the blind internees quickly learn that none of the rules that used to govern society apply anymore: there are no rights nor authorities to appeal to, and food, plumbing, and medicine are no longer guaranteed. From the moment the hospital’s doors are sealed, force becomes the only law: soldiers rule over the blind because they are armed and unafraid to kill, and later, the thugs take power because they have a gun. The thug leader’s gun not only symbolizes his power: it also is his power, because it is what allows him to force everyone else into compliance (either as a member of his team or a target to exploit). Whenever he shoots, people flee in terror, unable to see where the bullet is headed. After the doctor’s wife kills the thug leader, the blind accountant takes the gun in order to take power, although his hold on it is insecure.
Saramago’s message is clear: all of society is ultimately based on this capacity for violence, which governments usually reserve for themselves and promise to only use according to the laws they set out. But such promises are unenforceable: governments can wield their power however they like, just as in this novel the Government approves of the Ministry of Health rounding up the blind and the soldiers massacring them. Although people get used to the false sense of security that living in a democratic society gives them, crises like the white blindness epidemic are a stark reminder that all power is based on the capacity to cause physical harm or enlist others to cause that harm on one’s behalf, and that all governments are always capable of committing the kind of authoritarian atrocities that people generally see as confined to history.
Guns Quotes in Blindness
The soldiers would have liked to aim their weapons and, without compunction, shoot down those imbeciles moving before their eyes like lame crabs, waving their unsteady pincers in search of their missing leg. They knew what had been said in the barracks that morning by the regimental commander, that the problem of these blind internees could be resolved only by physically wiping out the lot of them, those already there and those still to come, without any phoney humanitarian considerations, his very words, just as one amputates a gangrenous limb in order to save the rest of the body, The rabies of a dead dog, he said, to illustrate the point, is cured by nature. For some of the soldiers, less sensitive to the beauties of figurative language, it was difficult to understand what a dog with rabies had to do with the blind, but the word of a regimental commander, once again figuratively speaking, is worth its weight in gold, no man rises to so high a rank in the army without being right in everything he thinks, says and does.
Guns Symbol Timeline in Blindness
